Intel Power Gadget for Mac is a processor monitoring tool that allows computer users to monitor the performance of an Intel processor in real-time. Intel Power Gadget will show you power and energy information in watts, the clock speed frequency of the CPU in GHz, the temperature of the CPU, and CPU utilization. It’s a handy utility for many reasons, and some Mac users may even use it as an alternative system monitor sort of like Activity Monitor.

Newer versions of MacOS can sometimes have trouble installing Intel Power Gadget, and many MacOS Mojave users have discovered the installation fails or the app doesn’t work. This installation failure is usually due to a default security setting in MacOS, and is easy to resolve.

How to Install Intel Power Gadget on MacOS

Installing Intel Power Gadget on the Mac is easy, though you may run into a Gatekeeper security block that can cause installation trouble. Here’s how to successfully install the tool in modern macOS releases:

• Download Intel Power Gadget from Intel.com for Mac, it’s free (also available for Windows)
• Launch the “Install Intel Power Gadget.pkg” from the mounted disk image as usual and start the installation process
• If you see a ‘System Extension Blocked’ message, click on “Open Security Preferences”, otherwise go to the  Apple menu and choose ‘System Preferences’ followed by ‘Security’

• Under the ‘General’ section of the Security preference panel, click the button to “Allow” the ‘system software from developer Intel corporation apps’ which was blocked by Gatekeeper *

• The Intel Power Gadget installer should proceed as usual and successfully install, if it fails then just run the “Install Intel Power Gadget.pkg” package installer again

• When finished, launch Intel Power Gadget from the /Applications folder as usual

If you run Intel Power Gadget while you’re using the Mac, you may notice that processor performance can change around quite a bit depending on what you’re doing and what sort of apps you’re using.

It is completely normal for the processor charts to be changing constantly, and you’ll find that the processor clock speed may go up or down, as will both CPU temperature and power, typically correlated with processor utilization – this makes sense as more processing utilization requires more power to have a higher clock speed, which raises the temperature of the CPU, and of course the opposite can happen as well with CPU speed lowering along with lower power and lower temperature and utilization when the Mac is less busy. If you’re interested in doing so, you can see this directly and test it yourself by running any CPU intensive task, like the Terminal command ‘yes’, which is often used for stress testing a Mac (or any Linux PC):

As you can see the graphs for power, frequency, temperature, and utilization suddenly shoot way up as the ‘yes’ command runs in the adjacent Terminal window as a stress test, which is normal and expected behavior for the processor.

Uninstalling Intel Power Gadget on Mac

Decide you don’t need Intel Power Gadget? Uninstalling Intel Power Gadget is quite simple. Simply navigate to the /Applications folder and open the Intel Power Gadget directory, then run the included ‘Uninstaller.pkg’ package file. This will remove the Intel Power Gadget application and the associated kernel extension from the Mac.

* If you’re a truly advanced Mac user and you’re bothered by these type of security measures causing installation issues, you can choose to allow apps from anywhere in macOS by disabling Gatekeeper, though that is strongly not recommended for the vast majority of Mac users. There are quite a few apps that can fail to install because of the stricter security standards that are in place in modern macOS releases, and if you’re the type of person running Intel Power Gadget then you may encounter also a similar issue with installing VirtualBox in MacOS where the kernel driver fails to install, thereby preventing that app to work as well. Typically you can bypass Gatekeeper on a one-off basis as discussed here, which is arguably the best approach, but you can also just turn it off completely if needed.